Muslims blamed for massacre of 48

LAGOS, Nigeria - Suspected Muslim militants armed with guns and bows and arrows killed at least 48 people in an attack on a farming village in central Nigeria. Most of the victims died as they sought refuge in a church, police said Wednesday.

The latest bout of Muslim-Christian violence in the region occurred Tuesday night in Yelwa, a mainly Christian town in Nigeria's Plateau State, police commissioner Innocent Ilozuoke said.

Army and police reinforcements helped restore calm, Ilozuoke said at a news conference in Jos, the state capital.

The killings appeared to be the latest retaliatory attack in a sporadic conflict that has rocked the central region since an outburst of sectarian violence in 2001, pitting Christians against Muslims in once-peaceful Jos. In the initial outburst in Jos more than 1,000 people died in one week.

Since then, several hundreds more have died as rival Muslim-Christian militias attacked isolated villages and towns.

For decades, the majority Christian inhabitants of Plateau and the minority Muslim population had lived in harmony.

Tensions between the two communities heightened in the past four years as 12 majority Muslim states in the north adopted the strict sharia, or Islamic, legal codes, perceived by Christians as an expansionist threat.

Since 1999, ethnic and religious violence has killed more than 10,000 people in Nigeria.

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